IN EARLY JANUARY, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, met Amir Khan Muttaqi, the acting foreign minister of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, in Dubai. This was the highest level of engagement between Kabul and New Delhi since August 2021, when the Taliban overthrew Afghanistan’s republican government and returned to power. The meeting was also a diplomatic setback for Pakistan.
Afghanistan has always been of geopolitical importance to Pakistan, providing it “strategic depth” in case of military attack by India. This was why Pakistan invested in and cultivated the Taliban for decades, long before the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. India never had a similar reason to develop ties with the Taliban, which it considered to be a Pakistan proxy in Afghanistan.
But now India’s intent is clear – it wants to normalise ties with Afghanistan regardless of who is in power in Kabul. By establishing ties with the Taliban, New Delhi hopes to not only marginalise Pakistan in Afghanistan but also gain access to Central Asian trade routes, where it can compete with China.
The timing of New Delhi’s gesture in reaching out to Kabul is partly an outcome of the fact that the Taliban regime is here to stay and, as a result, engaging with it is almost an inevitability for all regional powers. The push to normalise ties comes against the backdrop of growing involvement between countries in the region and Kabul. China sent an ambassador to Afghanistan in 2023, in what many saw as a step towards Beijing recognising the Taliban government – something no country has yet formally done since the Taliban’s return to power. In 2024, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan both took the Taliban off their lists of designated terror groups. Russia has indicated its intention to remove the Taliban from its terror list too.